


Old Roads

by bethagain



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Christmas, F/M, How did Max know they wouldn't make it across the salt flats?, Mad Max Secret Santa, Memories, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 05:55:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5486138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bethagain/pseuds/bethagain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes we need to remember what's down old roads, before we can build new ones.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Old Roads

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4979764) by [Icarusdusoleil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Icarusdusoleil/pseuds/Icarusdusoleil). 



> A Mad Max Secret Santa gift for fibonaccisinteruption on tumblr. Request was for the Max/Furiosa pairing, with maybe a little fluff and angst, and of course I had to throw in a little bit of Christmas. Let's see how I did!

“How did you know,” Furiosa said, “we wouldn’t make it across the Salt?”

Max reached past her and laid down a grease-covered bolt. His hands were black with old dirt. This car had been abandoned in the desert so long, it wasn’t a sure thing they’d get it running. Max would try, though. He’d developed a soft spot for things brought in from the Wastes. Things that were so worn, by events and time as well as sun and sand, that it wasn’t clear they’d ever work right again.

“Max?”

He didn’t look at her, just grunted a noncommittal “hm” and leaned over the engine.

 

_It wasn’t that he wanted to ignore her. It was just that he had no idea what to say._

 

She didn’t ask again for a long while. This time it was as the weather changed from summer heat to winter cool. They were sharing a night watch, backs against the pickup’s windshield, loaded guns in easy reach. It was too dry for frost out here, miles from the Citadel, but their breath made tiny clouds in the still air. 

It would have been sensible, Furiosa thought, to sit closer together. She wrapped her blanket more tightly around her body, tried to imagine she could feel some warmth radiating across the six inches between them.

“How did you know?” she said again. “You’d never been there.”

Max was silent, looking out over the starlit sands.

She turned to him, studying his profile, also silver-grey in the starlight. “Had you?”

It was a tiny movement, Max shaking his head. He never moved more than he needed to. She wondered if it was conservation of energy, or if he was afraid of taking up too much space in the world.

“No,” he said after a while. “I’d never been there.” The emphasis on “there” was also tiny, but she heard it.

“You’d never been there,” she repeated. “But you’ve been somewhere like it.”

“Somewhere,” he agreed, so softly she wondered if she’d even been meant to hear.

He stood, rubbing his hands together to warm them. “First light,” he said, inclining his head toward the thin band of lavender above the eastern horizon. “I’ll wake the next watch.”

Max was a shadow moving around to the side of the truck, giving a soft four-knock signal, waiting patiently while two War Boys emerged wrapped in scarves and rubbing their arms. Furiosa slid down from the hood and followed him, climbing up into the truck bed and crawling into her bedroll. Max stretched out beside her, and she thought again how practical it would be to scoot up next to him, press her back to his chest and stretch her legs along his. 

She pulled her scarf up over her head and around her ears, curled into a ball, and shivered until morning.

 

_Max lay awake, feeling every vibration her shivers made in the metal beneath them._

 

It was weeks later when he came to her. She was under an Opel Kadett, checking on repairs. Toast was a quick study, but Furiosa wasn’t about to send her out into the Wasteland without making sure everything was bolted properly back in place.

When Furiosa rolled out, Max was sitting beside the car. Still on her back, she looked up at him. The first thing in her vision was the brace on his leg, framing his left knee with rust-edged metal bands. (She’d never asked what happened. He’d never said.) He had his elbows on bent knees, back against a tire, head resting on the fender. He was looking at something but it wasn’t her. She thought it probably wasn’t anything there in the garage with them, at all.

“I’ll show you,” he said.

“Show me what?” she asked.

“How I knew,” he said. “About the Salt.”

Furiosa reached for a rag without sitting up. She wiped her hands, put the rag down. Let her head lie heavy against the creeper board, eyes closed. “You want to go back there?”

A moment passed, during which she thought he might have shaken his head. “Someplace else,” he said. “No convoy,” he added. “Just you and me.”

Just us, Furiosa thought. No convoy. You’re going to get us killed. The board was hard against her back but it felt good to rest her shoulders, no weight from her prosthetic arm. 

 

_It had been a real offer. Max hadn’t expected her to say yes._

 

They took the Interceptor. Of course they did, thought Furiosa, watching desert roll by outside the window. The car was primer black these days. No gloss paint in the workshop, and even Max had acknowledged that shine would act like a mirror in the sun. Fine for a war convoy, bad for a lone vehicle in parts of the Wasteland that even Max hadn’t traveled in… all he would say was, years.

Furiosa was sure he was driving by feel. She had seen her own face in the side mirror on that desperate run for the Green Place. Max wore the same expression now. He would ease off the gas and squint up at the sun, check the shadows, look around at the shapes of cliffs and valleys. 

He knew where he was headed. He didn’t quite remember how to get there.

 

_This was foolish, Max thought. Why did this even matter anymore? Why did he think it would matter to her?_

 

The land was flat behind them now, and flat for a couple more miles ahead. Low potential for an ambush. Furiosa reached up to rest the rifle on its rack above the windshield. Max’s eyes shifted to her for a moment: Agreed, safe for now. She’d bring the rifle back to the ready when they got nearer those hills. 

She wedged her knees against the dashboard and sank down in her seat. Her left foot was jiggling and she decided to let it: she had to get some energy out somehow. 

It made sense to have Max behind the wheel. He knew this car better than she ever could. But damn this was a long run.

The War Boys thought Furiosa loved the road, but that wasn’t quite true. She’d worked her way up from loading the tanker to riding guard to running raids to driving the War Rig, and those who knew her and respected her (and wanted to be kind to her? It only now crossed her mind.) would give her assignments that would keep her out, riding behind growling engines for miles and days. But what she liked, really, was having a purpose. Liked seeing her bullet land where she meant it to.

So when two sandrails emerged from the shadows of the first foothills, roll cages bristling with guns, she whooped out loud as she sat up and shifted the rifle to her shoulder. 

She was pretty sure she saw Max smile, just for a moment, before his foot landed hard on the accelerator. The Interceptor shot between the ‘rails, caught air over a gully, and was almost out of range by the time Furiosa got off her second shot. She watched with pride as each bullet connected with a tire and sent one of their pursuers flying. 

Max downshifted and the Interceptor’s engine wound down to a low purr, as they rode on into the hills.

Furiosa sat straight now, rifle reloaded, eyes on every shadow. 

She felt better already.

 

_They were getting near. He knew the shapes of these hills, even if everything else looked wrong. It had been wrong for such a long time. So, then, what would take the place of right? Could something take the place of normal?_

 

The hills had once been covered in trees. 

Furiosa had seen many human corpses, had shrugged her shoulders at missing legs and arms (including her own), had driven past bodies barely recognizable and considered them only for the protein. 

But these tall trunks, charred bark, stubs of broken limbs, made her shudder. They were too close together, these spindly shapes. They ruined her sightlines. They blocked too much of the sky. 

“Are you sure we should go in there?” she asked.

The Interceptor slowed, Max’s hands unmoving on the wheel but shoulders tensed as if considering a turn. 

The bare tree trunks stretched away to the horizon.They must end somewhere, but how far? How many days to go around them? She could see the stiffness in his neck, the pressure in his jaw. 

She didn’t speak again, just nodded: Forward. The Interceptor picked up speed.

The ghost forest surrounded them, leaned on them with its shadows, and it occurred to Furiosa that there had been a third option. 

They could have turned back. 

Was that what Max had thought she meant? 

He jumped when she said his name, but settled again when she tucked a pistol next to him on the seat. She checked the rifle’s magazine, brought the 9mm and the pump action shotgun up from in back, and breathed deep, channeling anxiety (fear?) into sharper senses, letting it vibrate through her muscles to keep them warm and ready to move. 

The air smelled faintly of fire. She wondered when these trees had burned. 

“Third Ash Wednesday bushfires,” Max said. He leaned toward the windshield and squinted upward, toward the tops of the charred trees and the slices of bright blue sky. “Long time ago.” 

The fine grey ash that their tires stirred up was already coating the windows, making the sky look darker and the shadows less sharp. Days of the week didn’t matter anymore, but she knew they’d once had names. “Ash Wednesday?” she asked.

“Something,” said Max, “that we used to believe in.”

 

_There was so much that he had believed in, in the days when this place was alive with water falling over rocks, with deep green pools for swimming, with wild voices of bright-colored birds. What would she think if her told her that these days, he mostly believed in her?_

 

They had to get out and clean the windows many times before the slopes began shifting downward more than up. The Interceptor was a uniform grey by then, ash thick on the wheels and the black-painted metal. Furiosa’s clothes were streaked with fine powder. She’d taken off her mechanical arm each time she got out. Left it within easy reach on the seat, wrapped it up in the black scarf from around her neck to try to save the mechanism. 

Max had a smudge on his cheek and even his knee brace was coated in a layer of grey.

She’d never seen Max without the brace, never seen what his knee looked like underneath. He moved so well with it on, she wondered if it was treating the memory of a wound more than any physical damage.

Well, need it or not, the thing had hinges, and all that dust was going to muck them up.

Furiosa unwound the scarf. “Let me?” she asked.

Max followed her line of sight. He seemed to consider, briefly, then hummed an affirmative. An efficient response, again. As if he were agreeing that she should reload their guns or load up an extra tank of fuel. She supposed that the brace was just another piece of machinery. She wondered if he thought of his body that way too, the brace a kludge to keep it working since it couldn't be repaired.

She started with the outside hinge, using a fingernail to push fabric under the rivet and into the junctures between the metal rods. She did the other side blindly, reaching over his knee as Max kept his foot on the gas.

The metal around the hinge stood out shiny now. Looked out of place. Furiosa leaned over again to clean the band encircling his lower leg. She knocked ash from his trousers above it, then traced a careful circle with the scarf. Over, then under the metal and the leather that held it snug. She slid the scarf up the rod on the side of his leg away from her, then the side she could see, watching silver emerge from under the ash.

When there wasn't a clean spot left on the scarf, she sat back up and trailed it out the window for a moment, leaving a plume of grey powder behind them.

Furiosa shifted in her seat to reach the band around Max’s thigh.

Her head almost connected with the steering wheel when the Interceptor stopped short. She was reaching for the rifle even as she sat up, eyes scanning their surroundings beyond the windshield.

What she saw was one of the blackened tree trunks, inches from the front bumper. 

They'd nearly driven into it.

Max cleared his throat. “Thanks. Works better now.” He didn’t demonstrate though. He moved just enough to shift into reverse and then forward again, while Furiosa hid a smile.

 

_He had to consciously work the clutch and the shifter so the engine wouldn’t lurch and stall. He couldn’t remember the last time he'd had to think about driving. Maybe when Jess was teaching him--she the experienced driver at 18, he at 16 without even a learners permit, refusing to wait any longer to get behind the wheel._

 

The smooth stretches of asphalt were short. The spaces between them made her teeth rattle. Old asphalt was a new thing to her, the deep holes that caught the tires and the broken chunks that lifted them up and dropped them down again. The desert she knew had soft sand and wind-smoothed stone. It had shattered rock where buttes and the edges of mountains had crumbled, yes, but its roads were worn places, tracks on tracks, filled in with the stuff that surrounded them. 

Here were other things made by man, too. At first there were charred remnants, a straight wall and sharp corner jutting up from windswept dirt. Further along, rectangular shapes were still standing, some with bits of glass in cut-outs that must have been windows. 

These structures had been built of wood. The forest had once been a living thing, a thing that grew and replenished itself, a living thing so vast that men could build these structures and the forest, all those miles they had traveled, could still be there.

She watched the tall black spindles receding to her left, watched as they passed buildings clustered closer together, as another road crossed the one they were on. People had lived here. People had driven these roads. 

How did Max know this place? What lived in his memory, here?

 

The land was changing, no longer ash and charcoal. She could see where low, prickly brush had once clung to life. The blacktop was less damaged here, longer stretches between the crumbled places.

Furiosa startled when Max gunned the engine and the Interceptor picked up speed--but there was no one behind them, and the way ahead was empty.

She didn't need to watch their progress. She never doubted he'd stop before the asphalt ended, never worried he'd push the engine past its limit. 

His hands were easy on the wheel, his shoulders down, no tension in his legs even as his foot sat heavy on the gas. She'd known him for so many days, now. She knew some of what he and this car had been through together, in the Wasteland before he came to her. But she'd never seen him look so much like he belonged behind that wheel.

She'd also never seen him look so very, very sad.

 

_He came back to the now when broken asphalt filled his view again, when it was time to ease on the brakes or else blow a tire on potholes and dropoffs. He was surprised, just for a moment, to find the world still changed. Then Furiosa reached out to put her hand on his shoulder and he felt things click back into place._

 

They followed the road for a while longer, jouncing over the broken sections, until finally Max slowed the car, then stopped, then backed the Interceptor up and turned right at another crumbling junction. 

It was just a short drive then, down a gentle hill through that once-living desert, to a low-roofed, multi-level building on a bluff above the road. 

Beyond it were dunes and beyond them: a flat plane of white canted gradually downward. And went on, forever, in the distance.

 

He called it a house, just like they'd called the fabric-walled structures in the green place “houses,” and the stone-and-scrap shelters at the Bullet Farm and Gastown. 

The house had been looted. The main door was ajar. Inside, all the storage cupboards hung open. 

Every time he came here, he said, something else would be gone. Furniture for burning, plates and pans for trade, maybe, or for making into something else. In one room there was still a bed, stripped of sheets and blankets. Open doors showed that the two small closets were empty. “Came back once,” he said, “and all her clothes were gone. Guess someone needed them.”

_All her clothes._

That was when she realized: Max had lived here. Max had lived here when there was a forest and enough to eat and everyone could turn on a faucet and have water. 

Max had lived here with his family.

 

_Now that they were here, he wondered why he'd risked their lives to bring her. He could have just told her, sat her down at the Citadel and explained. Why did he need her to see?_

 

They should look for supplies. The house had been looted many times, yes, but it wasn't empty. It was a shame they couldn't take that mattress back with them, surely someone could have used it at the Citadel. 

“Come on,” she said, not knowing what else to do, but needing to do _something._ “Let's see what's left.”

Max looked surprised for a moment, and Furiosa wondered again why he hadn't already cleared the place, traded what he could and stashed the rest. Everything was useful somehow.

 

There was a storage area under the stairs that led down to the road. The door had a splintered gap where a handle and lock must once have been. She reached in, careful of the shards of wood, and pulled the door outward.

Max stood behind her, pistol in hand, facing out while she stepped in.

The floor inside was littered with dust, shards of wood, crumbling bits of leaves and grass. Two paint cans sat against a wall, one marked with a pale, almost-white color and one with light blue. There was a light blue room upstairs. For a moment she pictured a younger Max up on a ladder, splattered with paint, while a young woman sat cross legged on the floor below him, brush in hand. 

She examined the thought and found it comforting, that this place might hold good memories. They were building better memories at the Citadel, true, but the history there weighed on her. She felt it from the moment she woke each day, gazing at stone walls, until she fell asleep each night under the weight of the rock above her.

She shook the cans, but the paint had dried solid inside.

The place was empty otherwise, except for one shape leaning up against a back corner. The light from the doorway barely made it that far. 

Her hand connected with something sharp-ended and prickly. There were several sticks, stacked up against each other, all covered in bristles. A tangled wire held some of them together. She lifted one of the sticks and brought it outside, into the light.

Max still had his back to her. He'd tucked the handgun in the holster at his hip. She stepped up next to him, speaking softly as she did so, so he wouldn't startle. She didn't need that gun in her face.

The road was quiet. The sun shimmered off the empty salt.

The thing looked like a tree branch, but made of metal instead of wood. Stiff green bristles stood in for leaves. She held it out to him. “What's this?”

He looked at the thing in her hand. And then he said, “I'll be back,” and he walked away.

 

_He wasn't sure how long he was gone, or even where he'd been. Furiosa was down at the edge of the salt, back against a dune, rifle by her side. He knew her the moment her shape resolved from a black dot against the sand. He wondered, if he didn't signal, if he'd find himself in that rifle’s scope._

_The rifle never budged._

 

“The Salt,” she said, as he sank down beside her. 

They looked out together toward the horizon, toward the knife edge of blue sky meeting land. She waited while he gathered up the words.

“You could still get guzzoline, then,” Max said. “Siphon off the tanks of the cars you'd find when-- Well. That you'd find.”

She couldn't imagine why he'd think he shouldn't say. That there was anything he’d seen--or done--that she wouldn’t understand.

“Filled the tank. Hooked up a couple auxiliaries. Meant to go till the guzz ran out.”

The salt was very white in the sun. Far off, she thought she could see shadows where the land folded into valleys, but it could have been her eyes trying to make sense of the blankness.

“Long way to walk back from,” she said.

“Didn't mean to come back.”

“But you did.”

Beside her, Max nodded, that small nod that barely moved his head. 

“Every time,” he said.

The world around them was quiet. No wind to stir the sand, no engine sounds from the road.

She'd never thought, before, about what it meant to keep moving. It had never occurred to her not to.

A while later, she broke the silence. “That thing I found. What is it?” 

 

_So strange to think of times like that, at times like this. He tried to tell her, he really did. He got as far as the lights and ornaments, before he ran out of words._

 

Furiosa had offered to take first watch. Max was asleep, curled in a bedroll just inside the main door. 

She thought the mattress would have been a lot more comfortable. But she also knew that sometimes, even good memories could make it hard to sleep.

The salt glowed beneath a quarter moon, reflecting plenty of light. The Interceptor’s windows glinted, even as the black paint remained a shadow. Furiosa kept one eye on the empty road while she pulled the toolkit from its place beneath an auxiliary fuel tank.

She started with the little lantern that plugged into the dashboard, carefully unwinding its wires. The plug on the string of tiny lights seemed to be permanently attached, so she used wire cutters to snip it away, then her knife to strip the plastic from the wire ends. She could always reattach it later, if it mattered. She was careful to match the wires correctly before she twisted them together.

She slotted the boughs one by one into the metal tree trunk. When she discovered some were missing, she turned the tree so the bare spots were hidden against the Interceptor’s fender. 

She wrapped the string of lights around the boughs. Then she waited as the moon sank below the horizon, until the Great Southern Cross had risen to the top of the sky.

 

_Max came awake, fast, to the sound of an engine._ That was the Interceptor. _He was on his feet and halfway down the stairs, gun out and leveled at the shape beside the car, before his eyes were fully open. And then the sight came into focus._

_He had to grab the banister for balance._

_Furiosa was sitting on the ground beside the tree. She had a blanket wrapped around her. Steam rose from a cup in her hand. Another blanket and another cup were on the ground beside her, just visible in the glow of the tiny multicolored lights._

 

She hadn't been sure this was right. Hadn't known if this was how it was supposed to look but even more, hadn't known if he'd ever want to see it again.

Max sat down next to her, drew the blanket around his shoulders, cupped his hand around the mug she'd filled for him and took a slow sip. It was only water, warmed to fight the nighttime chill, but he seemed to taste a memory of something more. 

He was silent for a long time, but Furiosa knew to wait. He'd get there. 

 

They had watched morning creep over the horizon so many times together, but this was the first time the morning came with Max's voice gone hoarse from talking. 

They’d turned off the engine long ago, couldn't spend too much fuel on something that had no practical purpose. The rest of the night they'd been four shadows in the starlight: the car, the tree, Max, and Furiosa. Three shadows by morning, the two of them somehow finally shoulder to shoulder, keeping each other from shivering in the cold.

 

_The sun was rising over the salt, the land a pale echo of a pink and blue and lavender sky. He lifted one hand slowly, slowly, to rest against her hair. To weigh her head against his shoulder. To keep her there._

 

Max checked the fuel tanks while Furiosa put their lantern back to rights.

They took away everything they had brought with them, and everything else that the Interceptor could carry. Doors and hinges off cabinets, pipes from under sinks. Locks and doorknobs. Innards and wires from something with a broken glass front, that Max had called a television. 

Supplies could mean good barter, good comfort, or the difference between life and death.

But they left the tree standing, lights wrapped round it, anchored by stones so it might still be there if another traveler happened by. 

Maybe someone else could use a memory, too.


End file.
